The Example

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Throne

After years of being called an eccentric who talked to his plants, Prince Charles is now an environmental hero. But his latest, most ambitious proposal—to label products with their carbon-emissions "cost"—makes him a target too.

Prince Charles after receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award at the Harvard Club, in Manhattan, January 28, 2007. Stephen Chernin/EPA/Corbis.

Charles is a prince whose time has come.

Not to take the throne—may his mother live long and provide Helen Mirren with material for many sequels—but to be granted an honor as impressive in its own way. More than a quarter-century has passed since the Prince of Wales began calling for wiser stewardship of the environment and doing what he could to set an example. The British press called him loony and eccentric: the prince who talked to plants. He doesn't look loony now. Charles's honor is the acknowledgment, both at home and abroad, that he had it right from the start. Passionate about organic farming and sustainable development, curious about ways to improve the "built environment" with holistic communities designed from scratch, unafraid to condemn trends he abhors—genetically modified foods, for one, wind farms for another—he's what his American counterpart, Al Gore, calls a "thought leader." His latest notion is his boldest yet.

To launch it, one day last December, Charles gathered some 200 of his influential countrymen at London's St. James's Palace. Lord John Browne, of British Petroleum, Stuart Rose, of Marks & Spencer, and BBC director general Mark Thompson mingled with members of Parliament, as well as eco-mavericks such as Zac Goldsmith. Finally the crowd moved into the high, wide Picture Gallery, its red flocked walls covered with oil portraits, many of them life-size, of kings, queens, and cardinals. The surprise guest was Prime Minister Tony Blair. Governments must lead, he said, if mankind is to reduce carbon emissions 60 percent or more by 2050, a goal the U.K. has set for itself. "But," he added, "this is not just about government. It's about companies and individuals. That's why I'm so anxious to give my support to what the Prince is proposing today." Accounting might seem boring to some, he said, with a nod to the banner behind him. "I find the subject riveting."

Charles's program does have the eye-glazing title of Accounting for Sustainability—"an exciting and interesting topic," as he put it dryly. And for a moment as he stood at the lectern, immaculate in a double-breasted gray suit with blue-and-red striped tie, he seemed duly stiff: the awkward figure Americans recall in his role as Diana's grim-faced husband, or two years ago at a press conference that interrupted his ski holiday in Klosters, when within microphone range he disparaged journalists as "those bloody people." But as he warmed to his message, his passion emerged. "This is my own small attempt to consider how we might more accurately, more 'truly and fairly'—to use that phrase much favored by accountants—begin to account for the wider social and environmental costs of our activities.… At one level, it appears that no one is accounting for these costs. Yet, at another level … we are all paying for them."

Charles's idea is at once simple and wildly ambitious. If a can of soup lists calories, why can't it also list the environmental costs of getting that can to market? A product flown halfway across the world leaves far more carbon emissions in its wake than a similar one made just down the road and brought to town by truck. Why not quantify that on the label? Companies can compete for the lowest "green" costs, consumers can make "green" buying choices, and those products with the lowest environmental costs—likely those made and sold locally—can be given the market value they deserve.

As a first step, Charles is "accounting" for the green costs of his own Duchy Originals, the food company he started in 1990, amid much eye rolling, to sell biscuits made with organically grown wheat and oats from the 900-acre Home Farm, near his country estate of Highgrove, in Gloucestershire. Today, Duchy Originals makes some 200 products, generating net profits of $2.3 million last year—all of which goes to charity—on sales of nearly $90 million, and sustaining what Charles calls a "virtuous circle." Raw ingredients are bought from small farmers—not the mega-farms that Charles so loathes—who use organic growing methods. Now, Charles told his crowd, he intends to quantify just how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted in growing, processing, and distributing those products, and give that information to consumers—"if," he acknowledged wryly, "it does not result in additional packaging."

To set a further example, Charles is subjecting his own carbon footprint to scrutiny, although he didn't dwell on that in his speech. Instead, two of his spokesmen met beforehand with a scrum of British journalists in one of Clarence House's smaller reception rooms to explain just what this meant. Already, the Prince has converted the 18th-century Highgrove to "green electricity," generated by providers who use sustainable energy sources. The estate has solar panels for some heat and hot water, a carbon-neutral boiler heated by woodchips, double-glazed windows, and eco-efficient insulation. It has a walled kitchen garden to supply fruits and vegetables on a self-sustaining basis year-round. It even has a reedbed sewage system to process waste, with solid matter recycled as manure and liquid sewage reconstituted as clean drinking water. (Weekend visitors take note.) Similar measures are being undertaken at Birkhall, the Prince's Scotland home. His city home is more of a challenge—Clarence House and the adjoining St. James apartments are part of the central power grid—but along with the obvious steps (energy-efficient lightbulbs, lights and appliances that shut off when not in use), Charles is looking into green power sources for those residences too.

For a globe-traveling royal, transportation is the hardest part of the footprint to reduce. The Prince's Jaguar and Land Rover are being retrofitted to run 100 percent on biodiesel. Charles plans to take trains instead of cars whenever he can, and so, apparently, do other members of the royal family. (The Prince's mother, Queen Elizabeth II, recently took a scheduled train to her country home at Sandringham, in Norfolk. She liked it.) And again, when possible, Charles plans to fly commercial instead of chartering private jets.

At this, the distinguished members of the British press, grudgingly respectful as they are now of Charles the Eco-visionary, suppressed a collective snicker. Last spring, Charles and his wife, Camilla Parker Bowles (now the Duchess of Cornwall), flew to the Middle East and India for two weeks with an entourage of 22 on Charles's chartered Airbus 319. The daily Independent commissioned an analysis which concluded that the air tour produced 40 tons of carbon dioxide—as the newspaper smirkingly put it, "the weight of six London buses." After all his talk about global warming as the greatest problem facing mankind, declared a spokesman for the eco-group Plane Stupid, the Prince was "clearly not walking the walk but talking the talk. If he is serious about climate change—and I am sure he is—he needs to start flying less."

From "those bloody people" in the press came questions bathed in that uniquely English brand of scorn. Would the Prince no longer take his private jet to ski holidays in Klosters? "We don't all stop flying and driving," one of the spokesmen said. "But there will be more intelligent ways to do this." So he won't use his Aston Martin or Bentley? "The Aston Martin was given to him on his 21st birthday," the spokesman said. "He only drives it 200 miles a year. The Bentley belongs to the Metropolitan Police—it's a bulletproof security vehicle." Where will the biodiesel come from? "Obviously, we don't want to transport it from a long distance." Is there any prospect of seeing the Prince on the tube? "Unlikely," the spokesman said with a thin smile. "It's a security issue." Does the Prince go round turning off lights himself? "Actually," said one of the spokesmen, "he does."

This June, for the first time, the spokesmen noted, Charles's annual review of his expenditures and income—submitted to the public—will delineate the carbon footprint for all his households, as well as his travel, and set goals for the following year. For the reflexively royal-wary British press, the footprint will be a fat new target, the more so next year if those goals aren't met. Charles knows this, of course. That he's willing to risk embarrassment in the hope of goading industry and government to reduce their own footprints is only the latest sign of how serious he is.

Unsolved is the practical matter of how actually to do that accounting. A bottle of Fiji water flown to London might have a quantifiable carbon emission—if the plane transporting it carried nothing but cases of Fiji water. But what if the plane carried various other products as well? How then could that individual bottle be judged? And if the plane was half empty, would the products it carried be said to emit twice the carbon as when the plane was fully loaded? How would the Fiji water's carbon emission compare with a bottle of Perrier flown in from Paris, given that a disproportionate amount of any flight's emissions occur during takeoff, whatever the distance flown? Even if companies could figure out how to do the math, how many would want to, and what would happen to those who refused? Would governments force them to do it?

In the next year, Charles explained to his guests, a royal task force will undertake case studies of willing companies in different fields to answer some of these questions. When those early adapters do account for their green costs, he's convinced, others will follow, pushed by market demand. "With increased business transparency," he declared, "we as individuals and consumers can pick the products that last the longest, that have been produced at minimum carbon rates, that have enriched a poor community, and that have sustained a forest or a fishery rather than helped exhaust it."

Ramrod-straight, his diction as faultless as his appearance, Charles seemed nothing if not the exemplar of British nobility that day. But the future King of England was in fact proposing something quite radical: a populist revolution to save the world.

Seven weeks later, Charles came to New York, accompanied by Camilla, to receive a Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment. This time, the Prince and his entourage flew commercial, nodding amiably at the economy passengers who did double takes as they filed by the royals in first class.

The next evening, within the Harvard Club's oak-paneled walls, an eclectic group mingled for cocktails: New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, Yoko Ono, biologist and author E. O. Wilson, actress Meryl Streep, Al Gore, and many black-tied others. Before a dinner of organic foods from self-sustaining sources, prepared by André Soltner, of Manhattan's now defunct Lutèce, and other celebrity chefs, Streep offered a few words of introduction. "When I was a little girl growing up in New Jersey, one of my goals was to marry the Prince of Wales," she said coyly. "Now, in my dotage, as I look at you with my reading glasses on, I get to show you my appreciation in a different way."

Streep made way for Gore, who pointed out that he and Charles had held their first serious talks about the environment two decades ago. "It was relatively unusual at that time," Gore said, "to run into someone who had that commitment." Of all the initiatives the Prince has taken since then, Gore said, one of the most important was still unsung. In l990 the hole in the earth's ozone layer created by chlorofluorocarbons had become a crisis that had to be—and was—averted. "Charles played a major role in alerting the world to that danger," Gore said. "His voice was central."

Soigné as always, Charles took his award and for a moment put aside his prepared remarks. "It was worth coming all the way here just to learn about Meryl Streep's unlikely dreams," he said. "It entirely made my year." Gore, he recollected, had helped him when they first met, on a documentary Charles was doing for the BBC called Earth in Balance. "And he was equally articulate and thoughtful in his own book Earth in the Balance," Charles said slyly, "which appeared … just a little later."

Utterly at ease in the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled dining room, its stuffed moose and elk heads suited more to an English shooting lodge than to a university alumni club, Charles gave a speech that was, for him, nothing less than an environmental manifesto. "In my own attempts to draw attention to environmental issues," he said, "I have always tried to ask what it is about our society and its values that has led us to act with such thoughtless destructiveness."

The answer, he felt, was both obvious and unnoticed. "We have come to see ourselves as being outside of nature," he said, "free to manipulate and control her constituent parts, imagining somehow that the whole will not suffer and can take care of itself, and of us, whatever we do." A largely urban population in the U.S. and abroad sees "excellent programs about nature on their television screens," the Prince observed, "but they have little—if any—direct experience of their own. Nature has become a simplified and sanitized arm's-length experience, to be switched on or off at will As a result, so many have lost what I would call a 'sense of harmony.'"

Two years ago, Charles recounted, he visited Sri Lanka to witness the aftermath of the Asian tsunami. He met tribesmen from the tiny Andaman and Nicobar islands, close to the quake's epicenter, off Sumatra. Many in the tribes had survived. They had lived on the islands for 50,000 years. In profound harmony with nature, they noticed subtle changes in the behavior of birds and fish before the tsunami. "These warning signs are woven into their folklore," Charles said, "and they responded immediately … moving quickly to higher ground and the shelter of the forest." Such people do not observe the world from the outside, the Prince added. "They consider themselves participants in it and define life on earth as 'sacred presence.' … They also take direct responsibility for the future."

In the U.K. and the U.S., the Prince suggested, government and industry are only now starting to worry about that future. But they feel the answers to global warming lie in technological fixes. While those may help, he said, they aren't enough on their own. "It does seem to me that the business community—which, oddly enough, often recognizes the value of instinct and 'gut feel'—has a particular responsibility to see and understand the broader relationship between mankind and the natural world."

Charles is serious: that much even the British press allows now. With that change in perception has come criticism of a new kind: serious criticism. Why, the press asked on the eve of his trip, was Charles flying over to accept his award at all? Why not accept it by videophone and save the CO2? The Prince had planned his next trip to be the family's annual ski holiday in Klosters. But now, for the environmental Prince, even that was deemed an indulgence. And so, amid growing grumbles, Charles canceled his holiday: he would save the carbon emissions by staying home. Scoffing journalists and politicians might fly at the drop of a hat, but Charles would set the royal example. prince charles cancels ski trip to save planet was the headline of a Reuters story datelined from London in response.

In one sense, there's no way for Charles to win. In another, as he well knows, he already has.